On Wednesday May 23, 2018, the OAPT is running its annual grade 11 physics contest. The competition is meant to check students’ understanding of the grade 11 curriculum. Students have 60 minutes to answer 30 multiple choice questions.

It takes a team of volunteers to make the contest happen and we want to open it up to the membership to get involved. We are looking for questions. Criteria include: (a) being based on the grade 11 curriculum, (b) mostly conceptual, and (c) original. Whether you have one question or five (or ten), please email it/them to oaptcontest@gmail.com by December 15.

Afterwards, the questions will be made available through the OAPT website as a resource for teachers to use as evaluations or as concept peer review questions. Credit will be given to all contributors.

Recently, a teacher asked me for advice about how to start running the OAPT physics contest. I asked some teachers to help me answer this question. As well as finding great advice for getting students to write the contest, I also learnt about other contests and how teachers were incorporating past OAPT contest questions into their course all year long. Read More...

We have always strived to have a range of question difficulty on our OAPT Grade 11 Physics Contest. We now have a new statistics feature, so that teachers will be able to review how well their students did on each question. When you find that your students had a difficult time with a particular question, you could try dividing your students into groups to discuss:

It is very important to have our students engaged in the classroom in order for deep learning to occur. Your students need opportunities to use their creative spark and build on their 21st century learning skills. Peter Benson’s TED talk does a great job of presenting how important this is.

Ideas for projects proliferate but many of these are time-consuming, expensive and beyond the skills of an average student and the tools of an average physics classroom. However, your students can build a catapult with K’Nex™ in just one class with virtually no prep and no trips to the wood shop. Read More...